Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator. Parrot is not about parrots, though we are rather fond of them for obvious reasons.

I'd like to go public with an idea I've been developing in discussions with the other recently elected Parrot Foundation Board of Directors and some other Parrot contributors: A one-day gathering of Parrot developers to be held in Portland, Oregon, USA on Saturday, October 16.

This gathering would have three objectives and the division of the day into parts would match those objectives:

1. Enable Parrot developers to meet each other face-to-face, get to know one another better, and start to figure out how each can best contribute to the project.

I proposed a pretty ambitious Google Summer of Code project this year. Although I didn't manage to do everything I hoped, I did manage to get a useful subset of threading functionality working in the gsoc_threads branch. In this blog post I will describe what I have working and what more needs to be done.